Previous Professor Says Free Lectures Did Not Boost Book Sales, Contrary to 'Wired' Editor's New Book |
Next U. of Wisconsin, U. of Texas Expand Their Agreements With Google |
July 09, 2009, 04:12 PM ET
Science Bloggers Should Get Total Access to Meetings, or None, Journal Says
Does tweeting a science conference make you a journalist? And what if a scientist tells you his presentation is “off the record?” Too bad, an editorial in Nature, the international weekly journal of science, says.
A few weeks ago, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York said it would require scientists who blog to ask permission before blogging about a presentation, just like reporters do for those events. But Nature says not only is that a bad idea, but it should just be disregarded.
“Anyone who’s heard the chime of a digital camera starting up in the middle of a session knows that clear, sometimes quite threatening, restrictions on photography are regularly ignored,” the editorial says. “So too it will be with social media users, for whom jotting down their personal reactions to a talk or poster on the fly is simply second nature.”
The journal says that researchers’ blogging is a good thing. “Critical discussion of worthy results should not in principle be restricted to walls of a conference hall or even the pages of a journal,” the editorial says. “Any meeting to which anyone can register is fair game for all available communications technologies — and any rules that cannot be policed will be ignored anyway.”
Nature says conference organizers can’t send mixed messages: all conferences have to be open for public discussion, or all conferences have to be closed.
“Meeting organizers need to be clear in their minds which of these two approaches is appropriate, and be explicit about it from start to finish,” the editorial says. But, it warns, if scientists rule in favor of keeping their research open to blogging, some may be cautious to present something that may draw criticism. “In competitive fields, presentations at open meetings will become even more protective and boring is an inevitable consequence of the Internet,” the journal warns. —Marc Beja
Add Your Comment
You must be logged in to add a comment. Please login now or create a free account.